Page 6 - IDEA Study 10 Skills Mismatches

 The youth unemployment rates in the Czech Republic are persistently low in international
comparison, not exceeding 10% among individuals with some upper-secondary education even
in times of economic crises. High unemployment rates only concern the small group of young
individuals with primary education, who only account for about 5% of the youth nowadays. The
fact that massive expansion of tertiary education did not translate into higher unemployment
rates provides first evidence that overeducation is not a big issue in the Czech Republic.

 Compared to EU average, both secondary and tertiary education is highly focused on technical
fields, such as engineering and metallurgy, architecture and construction. Secondary education
also produces large number of graduates of wholesale and retail, hospitality and restaurant
services and textiles production, while tertiary education is highly focused on pedagogy,
economics, medicine, and law. Tertiary graduates of these fields of study have one of the lowest
unemployment rates, so there does not seem to be an excess supply of graduates of the largest
fields.

 Vertical qualification mismatch, measured by the share of overeducated individuals, is also very
low in international comparison. Overall, about one fifth of the Czech population finds
themselves subjectively overeducated for their current job, while the objective and empirical
indicators define as overeducated only 12 and 8% of the working population, respectively.

 This study also examines the horizontal qualification mismatch, which refers to the situation
when individual’s field of study does not correspond to his/her occupation. The share of
horizontally mismatched individuals is relatively high for both individuals with upper-secondary
(60.5%) and tertiary (47.1%) education. However, these relatively high shares of mismatch stem
from a narrow definition of horizontal match used in this study. Moreover, these numbers are
not exceptionally high in international comparison.

 The shares of both horizontal and vertical mismatches differ substantially across fields of study.
The lowest share of mismatches is naturally among graduates of medicine, pharmacy,
architecture and construction, law, and pedagogy (highly regulated professions), but also
economics, electrotechnics and energetics, engineering, and information technology. However,
there seems to be only weak correlation between the share of horizontal mismatches and
unemployment rates across fields of study suggesting that the mismatch does not necessarily
reflect a suboptimal labor market situation.

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